CFP: Playing Games in the American Environmental Literature classroom
Panel at ALA 2025 in Boston 

Games are not diversions from real-world challenges such as environmental crisis; rather, games are already shaping the planetary future across scales and cultures. Climate-themed board games proliferate, inviting players to strategize potential solutions and envision novel infrastructures. Video games from major studios bring environmental justice themes to enormous player bases, while indie developers experiment with the affects entailed in ecological collapse. Many recognize that exercising agency within a gameworld, whether tabletop or digital, collective or individual, can help players make connections, understand concepts, retain information, give and receive feedback, assess strategy, and risk failure in a safe space where experiential learning is inherent in the design. 

This panel seeks proposals for papers by scholars of American environmental literature who use games in the context of the climate and energy humanities and/or implement games in their teaching or community work related to these fields. We are open to many types of games: tabletop, digital/video, interactive, collaborative, zero-sum, RPG, trivia, strategy, etc. Papers are welcome on game theory, game-style models (war games or climate scenario / energy transition games), data science as a kind of game, and the theory and ecological ethics of game-based learning. We are also interested in the ludic structures of environmental literature–for example, detective novels as ratiocination games, or the game-like metrical rules of villanelles. Scholarly and pedagogical approaches of all kinds are welcome, as are community-based projects involving the use of games.

Please send 300-word proposals and CVs to Debby Rosenthal (drosenthal@jcu.edu) by January 15, 2024